Sunday, November 22, 2015

Habermas on the terrorist attacks in Paris

An English translation:"The Paris Attack And Its Aftermath"(Social Europe, November 26, 2015)Excerpt:I’m confident that the French nation will set an example as it did after the attack on Charlie Hebdo. There’s no need here for repulsing a fictive danger such as the looming “subjection” to an alien culture. The danger is much more concrete. Civil society must beware of sacrificing individual liberty, tolerance towards the diversity of life-styles and readiness to take on the perspective of the other – all these democratic virtues of an open society – on the altar of an imaginary stage of security that we cannot reach anyway. Given the fortified Front National that’s easier said than done. But there are good reasons over and above exhortations. The most important is staring us in the face: prejudice, mistrust and seclusion of Islam, fear of it and a preventive fight against it, are also down to sheer projection. For jihadi fundamentalism expresses itself in religious codes but it is no religion. Under other circumstances it could use any other religious language, indeed any other ideology to hand, that promises redemptive justice. The world’s great religions have roots going back a long way. On the other hand, jihadism is a thoroughly modern form of reaction to uprooted ways of life. Of course, a prophylactic pointer to the background of failed social integration or faltering social modernisation does not absolve the perpetrators of their personal guilt.